Asian characters printing - not supported

[Ian Pilcher]

leanne wrote:
> 
> We tried to print Chinese on notepad but failed.
> We found that WINE default only writes western characters
> to postscript.  Is that true?
> 
...
> 
> I would like to ask if WINE will support multi-byte character printing?
> 

The PostScript driver itself has rudimentary support for the Unicode
BMP (U+0000 - U+FFFF).  It does not support multi-byte characters or
wide characters.

You will need a TrueType font with the characters that you want to print
(the driver can't handle non-Latin PostScript fonts), and you will have
to configure the driver to use the font.

    1.  Tell the driver where to find the TrueType font by adding
        a [TrueType Font Directories] to your Wine configuration
        file.  Something like this:

            [TrueType Font Directories]
            "dir0" = "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType"
            "dir1" = "/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType"

    2.  Edit the PPD that you're using and add the TrueType font to
        the list of printer fonts.  (You will need to know the Post-
        Script "FontName".  You may need to run the font through a
        TrueType-to-PostScript converter to get this.)

At this point a Unicode-capable application should be able to print non-
Western characters.  There may, however, still be code between the
application and the driver that does a Unicode-to-ASCII conversion, so
there are no guarantees.

Note also that the PostScript driver will use the TrueType font, but it
won't embed it in the output.  If you're using Ghostscript, simply make
sure that Ghostscript knows where to find the font and it will render
it.  If you're printing to a PostScript printer, you'll need to create a
Type 42 version of the font and embed that in the job.

It's a lot harder than it should be.

-- 
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Ian Pilcher                                           pilchman at attbi.com
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